Laughing Boy (20 page)

“He’s twenty-eight, but yes, that’s him.”

“And what’s dodgy about it?”

“Just that the four Pakis don’t exist and his chief witness is his wife. She has form stretching back to bullying at school, mugging and ABH on a neighbour. Word is that they are always arguing and had the mother and daddy of a row on the night in question, but nobody will make a statement on the record. We reckon she went for him with the carving knife and they’re making the best of it.”

“What’s he called?” Dave asked.

“Paul Usher.”

“And what’s she called?”

“Maria-Helena.”

He sat up at the mention of the name. “She wouldn’t be Maria-Helena Smith, would she, of the Sylvan Fields Smiths?”

“That’s her. Violence is a way of life with them and none of the neighbours dare say a dicky bird.”

Dave poked his tongue into his cheek and stroked his chin, pondering on his next move. “Want me to sort it?” he said, eventually.

“How?” Jeff asked.

“Whoa!” I said, slamming my chair down on to all four legs and holding up a restraining hand. “Just what have you in mind?”

“Nothing too illegal, indecent or dishonest,” Dave replied. “You bring Usher in for an interview and find out where his wife will be at the time. After I’ve had a quiet word
with her I’d be very surprised if she didn’t withdraw her statement.”

Everybody was looking at me. Sometimes, an ounce of local knowledge is worth all the highfalutin’ expertise you can throw at a case. Having all the acronyms in the alphabet backing you up is no substitute for a pair of eyes on the street and experience of the people you are dealing with. But there were risks, too. The Paul Ushers of the world had a good grasp of what we could do and what we couldn’t, plus free legal advice on tap. They knew their rights, as they often reminded us, and had little to lose and much to gain by
turning
the tables on the police. And then there was his wife, Maria-Helena. We had her safety to think of, too.

“No,” I said. “It’s too risky.”

We didn’t have access to the Internet at the station because of fear of collecting a virus. For the same reason it is
forbidden
to bring diskettes from home or take any home. Command and control at HQ have access but they’d have wanted to know what it was all about and I was wary of leaks. Normally I’d have seen someone I knew in the pornography squad and done it on the QT, but Dave said that his son, Daniel, was at home on a revision day, so the three of us went to see him. He haggled like a Moroccan souk trader but I stuck out at minimum wage and he agreed to help us. Dave fetched three more chairs and arranged them behind Dan’s.

“Which search engine do you want to use?” Dan asked.

“You tell us, we’re paying you enough.” He clicked a
button
and the screen was filled with advertising bumph.

“What are we looking for?”

“Try
Eye of the Storm
, please.” He typed
eye
and
storm
into the box and clicked the search button. Within seconds we had a list of references. They included a couple to do with hurricane tracking, a company that made horse drawn
carriages
and book about a day in the life of Jesus. “That could
be interesting,” I said, pointing to the book – the Bible is the favoured reading of most serial killers. There was another site to do with the Florida presidential election and one that proclaimed:
Eye Of The Storm; the legend of Tim Roper
. “Print them out, please,” I said, and Daniel leaned past me to switch on the printer.

“What next?” he asked when the printer had stopped.

“Try
Property Developer
,” I said and within seconds we were staring at another list names and references. It started with a couple of books about how to make millions out of property developing, and was followed by dozens of
companies
who had probably done just that, with or without the book. They were mainly in the Far East, as far east as Australia and New Zealand, with a preponderance in Malaysia.

“They don’t look very helpful,” Dave said.

“There’s hundreds of them,” Daniel told us, and
demonstrated
by paging through a seemingly endless list. “Same with
Eye of the Storm
– there’d have been lots more.”

“Try
XYZ
,” I suggested. When it came up all we had was a predictable list of more companies, consultants and
productions
that had all chosen the name in an effort to stand out in their local telephone directory. The only intriguing item was details of a John Adams speech in 1797 about “the XYZ affair.”

“Print us the first three or four pages of every reference we’ve looked at, please, Dan,” I said, “and I think we’ll have that one in full, plus the Jesus one.” I pointed at the John Adams entry.

“Before that,” Maggie interrupted, “can we have a quick look at this, please.” She’d been studying the list that Dan had printed earlier, and now she was holding it in front of him, pointing at the name of Tim Roper. Dan back-paged several times until he was there, adjusted the mouse until a little fist appeared above the name and left-clicked it. The middle of screen went blank and I watched the blue bar
slowly extend in its little box, like the mercury in a
thermometer
. It was probably coming all the way from America, so I told myself to be patient.

Eye Of The Storm
, it said.
Welcome to the official Tim Roper and The LHO website
. There was a menu across the bottom of the page and Dan clicked on
Tim
. A photo
started
to unfold, strip by strip, until we were looking at a
clean-shaven
, handsome boy with long hair, wearing a T-shirt. He was leaning forward, looking at the camera, with an electric guitar across his body.
Tim Roper
, it said,
1944 to 1969
–
elegido por Dios
.

“He was quite a dish,” Maggie observed.

“And died young,” Dave added.

“What does that mean, Dan?” I asked, pointing at the screen.

“
Chosen by God
.”

“Thanks. It must be nice to be educated.”

“It’s OK.”

“Let’s see some more.”

Tim Roper, we learned, was a singer-songwriter in Los Angeles, forming his group, The LHO, in 1960 while at high school. He earned fame of a sort for his anti-war lyrics and his stance against commercialism, and died of gunshot wounds in mysterious circumstances while being
investigated
by the CIA for un-American activities. His most famous song was ‘Eye Of The Storm’ but he was believed to have written one called ‘Theo’s Tune’, which went to number one in several charts in the winter of 1969, after his death.

I read it all twice, then said: “Click
The songs
, please.”

The screen unfolded and there it was, near the bottom of the list. “Oh my God,” Dave whispered. “Oh my God. It’s there, look.”

Tim Roper had written a song called ‘The Property Developer’. We stared at the words, expecting them to
blossom
before our eyes into some multi-coloured
fire-breathing
shape with horns and a tail. Dan broke the silence. “Want to hear one?” he asked.

We did. It took nearly a minute to download, then the tapping of a cowbell slowly filled the room, followed by a twangy guitar and a keyboard. When he started singing he had a strained contralto voice like syrup being squeezed through a syringe. Neil Young on a bad day. He sang:

We’d been crowded around the computer in Dan’s bedroom, and it suddenly felt oppressive in there. I stood up and went downstairs, the high voice following me until I closed the kitchen door and shut it off. I filled a cup with water from the tap and drank it. As the first words of the song came out of the little speakers the sweat on my spine had changed to ice. It was a voice from the grave, and thirty-two years later and six thousand miles away someone had been inspired by it. Inspired enough to kill seven strangers.

I went through into the front room and sat in an easy chair, waiting for the others to come downstairs.

By lunchtime next day we had our own Internet access in the incident room, plus transcriptions and photocopies of every lyric and poem Tim Roper had composed. We even had recordings of the songs themselves, kindly downloaded by Daniel and put on CD ROMs for us. He was probably breaking all sorts of copyright law but I granted him a
dispensation
. I shared out the song sheets and several of us
spent the rest of the day poring over them. There was no contact address on the website and nobody in the office knew how to trace such things, so we handed that little problem to our technical department.

Most of the lyrics were fairly typical Sixties
anti-establishment
stuff that I’d happily have sung along with back in those days. Some of the later stuff was more poisonous, advocating bombing schools and shooting politicians. When I listened to them performed, however, the anger came over but the actual words were lost in the wall of sound. Most modern rap records were probably just as violent, had you been able to hear and consider the words. One or too had an uncanny topicality. What goes around comes around:

The phone rang, startling me. At the back of my mind was the fear that another body was lying somewhere, waiting for an unsuspecting jogger or dog-walker to find it. Every time the phone rang I hesitated, my hand hovering over it as I said a little prayer. This time it was the lab, and I heaved another sigh of relief. They told me that the letter from the killer had probably been printed on a Hewlett Packard 600 series printer. The paper transfer rollers leave evidence of their action behind and the paper rack leaves indents on the
bottom
edge of each sheet. The spacings were consistent with the HP, and that’s all they could tell me. No DNA. No prints. When we caught him it would be another piece of
circumstantial
evidence, but it wouldn’t help us catch him.

Five minutes later it was ringing again. This time I learned
that Naomi had been positively identified as Norma Holborn, aged 33, a convicted prostitute who worked in Manningham Lane, Bradford. I gave our press office
permission
to release her name and sent someone to collect the CCTV tapes.

Tim Roper had written a series of short poems called
What Did You Do In The War, Dad?
My favourite was called
#
23
, although there were only eight of them. It read:

Put Tim’s mother in the family way, that’s what Dad did in the war. Dr Foulkes might find something of interest in that fact and the effect it could have on an impressionable small boy, but it wasn’t much help to me. I was working at a spare desk in the main office, because my little one gives me
claustrophobia
and it’s noisy if I have the window open. I can’t hear myself think for the pigeons cooing. Pete Goodfellow came over and asked me if I’d like a coffee.

“Please,” I replied.

“Any joy?”

“Nah, not that I’m expecting any. His dad didn’t go off to fight in World War Two, and he’d have liked him to have been a hero. Big deal. You?”

“Not much. Hogans are what Navajo Indians live in, and
Tents of Kedar
is a biblical reference, that’s all. Haven’t found any others.”

“Don’t tell me: Revelations. That’s where all the nutters’ Bibles fall open.”

“Actually, it’s the Song of Solomon.”

“Well that’s a change. Have you had a look?”

“Mmm. Doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

“Well it won’t to me, that’s for sure.”

“Have you seen this morning’s
UK News
?” Pete asked.

“About Madame LeStrang? Yeah, I saw it.” Julia LeStrang was a self-styled psychic and a charlatan with a taste for
publicity
.

“She says she can help find the killer. Claims she told us where to find Georgina Dewhurst’s body.”

I felt my hands start to shake, like they had the day I’d slit open the bag that contained what had once been a delightful little girl. “The person who put it there told us where to find Georgina’s body,” I said, my voice almost a growl, “and if that old witch starts causing trouble by going round upsetting people, resurrecting ghosts, she’ll be
hearing
from me.”

“Right. I’ll, er, make that coffee.”

I moved back to my office and found an envelope in the bottom drawer. Inside it was a school photograph of Georgina wearing a blouse and striped tie, giving a
gap-toothed
smile at the camera. She’d been eight years old when her stepfather smothered her, and I’d found her body wrapped in a bin-liner in a rat-infested workshop at a
disused
coalmine. My wife was pregnant when she left me but I didn’t know. I found out by accident, after her new boyfriend had signed the consent forms at the clinic. Eight would have been the same age as… Ah well, I thought, no point in going down that road again. I placed the picture back in its envelope and slid it under the files as Pete came in with my coffee.

Things were moving so I rang my opposite numbers at Hatfield and Hendon and arranged a meeting with them at the police training college. Chief Superintendent Natrass was on leave but Martin agreed to represent him. Not
wanting
to be too outnumbered, and preferring some company on a long drive, I took Maggie along.